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"The work of priestly formation these days must involve a strong catechetical component since so many of our people have been deficiently formed. The resources you provide are allowing the Church to do a better job in preparing Catholics to know and defend their faith more effectively."

The Catholic Church teaches infallibly, “extra ecclesiam nulla salus,” or, “outside the Church there is no salvation.” But as with all dogmas of the Faith, this has to be qualified and understood properly. The Catechism of the Catholic Church lays out the truth of the matter succinctly in paragraphs 846-848, but I would recommend backing up to CCC 830 for a context that will help in understanding these three essential points...

At today’s National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama criticized the Islamic State for its brutal atrocities, which seem to be multiplying beyond our ability to express outrage. For example, earlier this week while America was passionately debating whether the Seahawks should have passed or run on second-and-goal, the Islamic State doused a captured Jordanian pilot...

In the modern Jewish tradition, converts to Judaism are often called Jews by Choice, which indicates that they were not born to Jewish families but chose to become Jews. A few years ago, I listened to a roundtable discussion on conversion to Judaism by Jewish converts. One gentleman participated in the discussion only very reluctantly and after concerted effort by the organizer to...

I was in England for a couple of weeks in June (a working trip, not a vacation) and lodged in modest circumstances at the base of a hill. Halfway up the hill was a convent recently occupied by sisters from the Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham. These are nuns who formerly were Anglicans.

Call it seredipity or Providence, but I discovered that the Ordinariate nuns were having a visitor for a few days--none other than my dear friend Rosalind Moss, who now is a Benedictine...

In the year since Pope Francis's election, I have watched with mounting concern as conservative Catholics have become increasingly agitated over the Pope's simpler papal style, his seeming lack of concern for precision in speaking and writing, the contrast between him and the Pope Emeritus, and his critique of ideologies that they hold dear. In response, I have written a number of blog posts that were intended, in part, to ...